QUEST OF THE FIREBIRDS 261 



to endure sun and thirst and the sting of salty water, it would 

 be a mecca for hundreds of thousands. But that will never be, 

 for when civilization comes the flamingos depart forever; this 

 most marvelous of all avian sights will remain the privilege 

 of the few, a half dozen naturalists and inquisitives who have 

 tucked in their bodies an unquenchable thirst for the unbe- 

 lievably exquisite, the ultimate of loveliness. 



Flamingos are the waning remnants of a once considerable 

 group that had their being as far north as the present polar 

 regions. Time has eliminated all but small portions of the 

 numerous species that once roamed the world. Farther and 

 farther back into the lonely and desolate regions they have 

 been crowded until at the time of this writing there are re- 

 maining only a few great colonies in this hemisphere. There 

 is still a large colony on the island of Andros and some scat- 

 tered groups along the sandy coast of Brazil; the Inagua colony 

 is the greatest and the most magnificent of all. Here, unless 

 fate hurries the inevitable by the medium of a great hurricane 

 or exploitation by man, the flamingos will make their last stand 

 before they, too, will take their final flight into the misty 

 passages of time along with all the other wonderful creatures 

 of the past, with the dinosaurs and pterodactyls, the saber 

 tooths and the great sloths. The people of the earth, in spite 

 of war and famines and pestilence, are steadily crowding out 

 the wild things; new modes of transportation are pushing 

 back the frontiers. Only those creatures which are exceed- 

 ingly adaptable can survive man's companionship outside zoos 

 and reservations. Flamingos are not adaptable, and unless they 

 are accorded permanent and strict seclusion, the hour is not 

 far distant when they will be gone. And nature as if realiz- 

 ing that these flamingos are probably the last of their kind 

 has created in them the most completely gorgeous of all liv- 

 ing birds of equal size. If they are exterminated in the next 



